Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [381]
“Pa wé Christophe?” Sans-Souci asked me. You didn’t see Christophe?
I told him I had not seen anything of Christophe or his men that day, because I had come across the plain where I would not expect to find them. Christophe commanded the posts of the mountains from Marmelade to Grande Rivière, which Toussaint now named the Cordon du Nord, and Sans-Souci knew that as well as Riau did. In Toussaint’s order of the army, Sans-Souci was in Christophe’s command since before Leclerc came with all his ships and soldiers. But I thought that Sans-Souci would never be commanded altogether by anyone but himself and his own mêt’têt.
“You came across the plain alone?” Sans-Souci said. “If the blancs are so weak, Christophe ought to come out of the mountains and drive them straight to the walls of Le Cap.”
Sans-Souci looked like he wanted to spit when he said this, and he did break a chicken bone and throw it over the gallery rail. A little dog came out from under the steps and began to crunch it, and then another dog came from behind the house to fight the first one for the bone. It was getting so dark I could not see the dogfight very well. Maybe it was true that the French blanc soldiers were weak enough in the plain that Christophe could beat them, but it was always dangerous to fight the blancs in the open country where they themselves best liked to fight, and no one knew exactly when more soldiers came into Le Cap on new ships, and Toussaint had ordered Christophe to stay in the mountains. Sans-Souci was staying in the mountains himself. But I did not say any of those things to him then.
“I got across the plain because the blancs are slow and I have a good horse,” I said.
Sans-Souci showed his teeth in a way that was not much like a smile. “If he needs to run away from the blancs,” he said, “I think Christophe could outrun your horse on his two legs, Riau.”
At that I laughed, and Sans-Souci laughed with me. His laugh was easier than that smile had been. It was true that in the beginning of the big fight with Hardy, Christophe came so close to getting made prisoner by the French blanc soldiers that he had to run away barefoot through the bush, because he had thrown away his boots and his coat and his general’s hat so those blancs would not know just who it was that they were chasing. But afterward Christophe had turned his men to face the blancs again, and helped to beat them.
“Maybe Christophe spent too long holding the dish for the blancs to help themselves,” Sans-Souci said when he had finished laughing. “Maybe that is a habit he can’t break.”
I did not make any answer to this at all, but only moved my head in a way that might mean either yes or no. The dogs had stopped fighting by then, and it was quiet, because the bone was gone. I looked across the gallery rail to the hill where coffee trees stood. There was just enough light to still see the trees and see how they were all covered with vine. Nobody had been tending those trees, and if Toussaint saw them so he would be angry, and Dessalines would have whipped the commandeurs with thorns. Now it was so dark I could see only the shape of Sans-Souci’s head, but not his face. Maybe Sans-Souci really did not trust Christophe, or maybe he only meant to test Riau.
Sans-Souci came out of Guinée, in chains like those that were hammered onto me. He was Congo, like Dessalines, and I think he must have been older than Riau when he was taken, old enough to know something about the Congo way of fighting before he came. Christophe was Creole, born a slave, as Toussaint was born, though Christophe came from one of the English islands. Before our rising, Christophe worked as a waiter in the Hôtel de la Couronne at Le Cap, and that was what Sans-Souci meant to spit on him for now. But in those same days Christophe had also gone across the water to Savannah to fight for the blancs there, and he had learned something of the blanc way of fighting, and fought well enough that he got his freedom for it. That was the story which was told.